Press releases

A number of mathematicians who have held positions, were long-term visitors, or PhD students at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics are invited to present their work at the next International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), which will take place in 2018 in Rio de Janeiro. Most notably, Geordie Williamson, who has been Advanced Researcher at MPIM from 2011-2016, is invited as plenary speaker. Further invited speakers with ties to MPIM include:

Geordie Williamson has received a New Horizons in Mathematics Prize jointly with Benjamin Elias for pioneering work in geometric representation theory, including the development of Hodge theory for Soergel bimodules and the proof of the Kazhdan-Lusztig conjectures for general Coxeter groups. Geordie had been advanced reseracher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics from 2011 until August 2016, when he moved to a position at the University of Sydney in his native country Australia.

The New Horizons in Mathematics Prize is an annual prize for junior researchers who have already produced important work. It consists of a monetary award of $100,000. The prize was established in 2016 and is funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner. The prize was awarded together with the Breakthrough Prizes 2017 on December 4, 2016 at a red carpet gala ceremony in Silicon Valley hosted by Morgan Freeman.

Pavel Mnev, an Advanced Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics from 2014-2016, has been awarded the 2016 André Lichnerowicz Prize in Poisson Geometry. The biennial award is given for outstanding work by young mathematicians in Poisson Geometry.

Pavel Mnev received his Ph.D. in 2008 from the Steklov Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg under the direction of the mathematical physicist Ludwig Faddeev. Mnev held a postdoctoral position at the University of Zurich, before coming to the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn in 2014. This fall, he has moved to a faculty position at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests are in mathematical physics, in particular in the interactions of quantum field theory with topology, homological/homotopical algebra, and supergeometry.

Danylo Radchenko, PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and the Bonn International Graduate School for Mathematics, on the famous sphere packing problem, his contribution to the proof in dimension 24, and on being a PhD student in Bonn.

You are co-author of a paper about the sphere packaging problem in dimension 24. Let’s start from the scratch: What’s the sphere packing problem about?

This problem goes way back to 1611 when Johannes Kepler discussed the question how to stack cannon balls most efficiently. He found the answer, but he couldn’t prove it. This is why it’s called the “Kepler conjecture”. Since then, physicists have been working with his solution. But for mathematicians it’s not enough to know the answer, we also have to find a way to deduce logically why it is indeed correct. The solution is actually pretty simple. Almost everyone will find it intuitively if you give them a bunch of balls and some time. But the mathematical proof of this is highly complex. Even for a normal three dimensional room, the proof was found only in 1998 by Thomas Hales.

At a press conference on June 1, 2015 in Hong Kong, the Shaw Prize Foundation announced that this year's Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences is awarded in equal shares to Gerd Faltings and Henryk Iwaniec for their introduction and development of fundamental tools in number theory, allowing them as well as others to resolve some longstanding classical problems. The prize consists of a monetary award of one million US dollars.

Prof. Kari Vilonen has received one of the prestigeous Humboldt Research Awards of 2014 for his important contributions to geometric representation theory. He will use the award for a research stay at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. His host is MPIM researcher Geordie Williamson.

Gerd Faltings, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn and Professor at the University of Bonn, was awarded the 2014 King Faisal International Prize for Science for his groundbreaking contributions to algebraic geometry and number theory. This was announced by the president of the King Faisal Foundation, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, on 14 January 2014.

Bonn, May 30, 2012. The Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn mourns the death of Professor Dr. Friedrich Hirzebruch. As it became known on Tuesday, the eminent mathematician and citizen of Bonn passed away on Sunday, May 27 at the age of 84. Professor Hirzebuch is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, which he headed from 1980 to 1995. His work largely influenced the development of modern mathematics. Through his personal efforts and achievements he contributed in an essential way to the reconstruction of mathematics research in Germany after World War II.

The renowned mathematician Curtis McMullen from Harvard University is one of the recipients of the Humbold Research Award 2011. He will use the award to spend the Fall of 2011 as sabbatical at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.

Director emeritus Prof. Yuri Manin received the János Bolyai International Award for Mathematics from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on December 1, 2010. The prize was established in 1902 and is awarded every five years for the best mathematical monograph of the last 15 years. It consists of a cash award of US$ 25,000 and a medal.